Hello,
After watching
the New Year arrive, I set my sights on my bed in hopes of getting a swig of
sleep before an early morning awakening to go and preach at a church that the
Internet estimated to be about an hour away. The church had two services, 8:30
and 10:45, which meant that I needed to be on the road by 6:45. It was still very dark when I hopped in
my car after scrapping the ice from the windshield. The patchy fog made the morning even seems earlier as the
earth was joining me in shaking loose the fog.
I
climbed my way out of the valley in which I am living, and turned south on the
major two-lane highway on my way to a church that I had never been to before. Within a mile of turning south I heard
a crunching noise underneath the tires of my car, and with a quick look to my
right I saw the mini-van in the ditch that had left debris on the road from its
accidental trip off the road. With
no other traffic around, I decided that I should check to see if there was any
one in the mini-van. So, I turned
the car around, turned on my brights and crept slowly toward the mini-van that
was resting up against a power line pole.
The front nose of the car was crunched in, the windshield was cracked,
and the passenger window had crumbled.
I eyed the interior and saw no one there, but as I glanced around I saw
a silhouette standing on the other side of the road in a driveway. I drove up to the silhouette and
discovered it was a teen-age boy making a call on his cell phone. As he talked, I pulled into the
driveway and I asked him if he had been the driver of the mini-van, to which he
nodded as he spoke on the phone.
He didn’t look very disheveled, and so I asked him if he was alright, to
which he nodded as he continued his conversation, saying, “Yes, mam,” several
times.
As I
pulled out of the driveway and headed back on my way, it occurred to me, “What
would have I done if he had been hurt?”
There was a church depending upon me still over an hour’s drive
away? Of course, I would have
stopped, but I know that my mind would have been divided over concern for the
boy and concern for congregation awaiting my leadership. After all, I couldn’t be in two places
at the same time.
It got
me to thinking, that this season of Christmas shows us that what we cannot do,
God can, and does! When God came
across a humanity, which includes you and me, that had crashed and crumpled in
the fog of life, he stopped everything that he was doing to attend to our
wounds – fully, completely and undistracted – being born in a Bethlehem manger. Nothing in the universe was more
important to him and nothing ever will be. His death on the cross shows that.
And yet
his full presence in the manger did not distract him from every speck of dust
and ray of light in the universe that was counting on his attention. When we look to the vastness of the
universe and ask ourselves, “When I consider the universe, why would God care
about me? (Psalm 8)” The answer is
that God can and does what you and I cannot. Even the best human multi-tasker can only shift their focus
from one thing to another. And
even with cell phones and computer skyping, we can only be in one place at one
time. Yet God is not so bound. God has shown himself able to
focus his complete attention on more than one thing at one time, and he has shown
himself to be completely present in more than one place at a time. We see this clearly in Jesus, where the
infinite God took on finite flesh and bone.
So, if
you find yourself skidding off the road this week, banged up and bruised…fear
not….God is not too busy to stop and set his complete attention on you…that is
what this Christmas season is all about.
Have a great week.
God’s grace and peace,
Pastor Jerry Nuernberger
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